A former election official in Philadelphia has confessed to stuffing ballot boxes after taking bribes to do so, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The official in question was an “elections judge” and former Democratic committee member named Domenick DeMuro. DeMuro confessed to taking “thousands of dollars from a political consultant” to fill out empty ballots and report false returns after putting the filled-out ballots in the ballot box.
He pled guilty on March 16th in a federal court. The charges consist of one count of conspiracy to deprive persons of civil rights, and one count of using interstate facilities in aid of bribery.
U.S. Attorney William McSwain, who was part of the prosecution team in DeMuro’s case, released a statement that “DeMuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.”
DeMuro accepted a bribe of approximately $2,500 to commit the crime, doing so in both the 2014 and 2016 election cycles. He is set to be sentenced on June 30th.
The clear-cut case of voter fraud highlights concerns from President Donald Trump and the Republican Party about Democrats’ efforts to legalize mail-in voting and ballot-harvesting nationwide, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) including such measures in the Democrats’ most recent Coronavirus relief bill. Voter fraud, though dismissed as a conspiracy by Democrats, has been confirmed in many other cases across the country, including New Hampshire and, most recently, in the 2018 House elections in California.